Sunday, September 27, 2015

Clinton.com Still Bleeding from Email Scandal

A string of emails that has been provided to the State Department raises new questions about whether Hillary Rodham Clinton has accurately described her use of a personal account when she was secretary of state.

Mrs. Clinton has said that she retained no emails from her first two months in office because she used an account that she no longer has access to. She has said that on March 19, 2009, she began using the personal account — hdr22@clintonemail.com — that she relied on for the rest of her time in office.

But on Friday, State Department officials said they had been given copies of an email chain between Mrs. Clinton and David H. Petraeus, the commander of United States Central Command at the time, that shows that Mrs. Clinton was using the hdr22@clintonemail.com account by Jan. 28, 2009.

Mrs. Clinton has said publicly and in a court filing under oath that she gave the State Department last year all of the 30,000 work-related emails in her possession. It is not clear why she never provided the newly discovered email chain to the State Department or why she said she did not begin using the hdr22@clintonemail.com account until two months after she took office.

She lied again. It's reflexive with the Clintons. It may not even serve a purpose other than to throw a cloud around everything.

Sharyl Attkisson explains What did Hillary Clinton do wrong? A pretty decent review of the facts of the Clinton email scandal, useful because so much has gone by that the early facts have been forgotten in the swirl of accusations, lies and slow rolling the email discoveries.

Among the emails released thus far are revelations about what Clinton was doing the night of the Benghazi attacks, how her team coordinated with the White House to assign blame for the attacks, and the role of Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal in assisting Clinton on intelligence in the region.

The Clinton emails, which total over 55,000 pages and were turned over to the State Department by Clinton this spring, were originally sorted by Clinton adviser Heather Samuelson. It is not clear whether Samuelson possesses a security clearance.

The glitzy Clinton Global Initiative gathering in New York, which has the lofty title “The Future of Impact,” was supposed to have been a celebration of the accomplishments of the $2-billion Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation’s past work as it pivots towards a future with Chelsea Clinton at the helm.

Instead, it’s become emblematic of the foundation’s struggles to regain its luster, while scaling back some of its ambitions and restructuring amid heightened scrutiny of its internal workings, the diminished role of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the prospect that former president Bill Clinton also could be forced to step back.
. . .
The documents, reviewed by POLITICO, also show that the foundation had hoped to land either Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen or French economist Thomas Piketty to deliver a presentation on income inequality. Both declined, as did Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Rock legend Elton John was invited to receive an award for his efforts to fight AIDS, but he’s not coming, and neither is New York City Mayor de Blasio. He had been invited as a guest rather than as a speaker and notably has refused to endorse Clinton, despite having managed her successful U.S. Senate campaign in 2000.

The answer is a whistle-blower in the mold of Markopolos has come to my attention and his name is Charles Ortel. Like Markopolos, Ortel has a background as a financial industry executive in addition to a successful track record of identifying economic trends and systemic problems within companies, most notably General Electric.

Throughout 2015, Ortel has carefully studied and documented a decade’s worth of domestic and global fraud, theft, corruption and violations of strict IRS rules being perpetrated by a prestigious multi-billion dollar charitable organization known as the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

Unlike Markopolos, who went to the SEC and was largely ignored because of incompetence, Ortel believes that the IRS is actively in collusion with the Clinton Foundation.

Collusion with the high-profile charity explains why the IRS is not thoroughly investigating Ortel’s carefully documented allegations of illegal activity on a scale so grand that a major audit would certainly be triggered if the name of the foundation was not “Clinton.”

Only collusion explains why, for over a decade, the IRS has allowed the Clinton Foundation, and all its umbrella organizations with different names to operate outside the strict rules and regulations under which all tax-exempt charities must operate or risk losing their tax-exempt status.

Ortel calculates that 2004 was the year when the foundation began engaging in massive fraud. Now guess who was director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Rulings & Agreements Division at that time? And guess who in December of 2005 was promoted to director of the entire IRS Exempt Organizations Division? Does the name Lois Lerner ring a bell?

It has often occurred to me that the Clinton Foundation (the major source of slush money for Clinton.com) has to be all over the line for non-profits, but that it was being ignored while the IRS went after the little guys trying to start Tea Party groups. Why wasn't any attention being paid to the Gorilla in the room?
A great essay by Sultan Knish: The Last Days of Hillary

. . . The only lesson that Hillary Clinton drew from her last election was to double down on all the things she did wrong. Her organization was big last time so she made it even bigger. It got so big that the different Super PACs were fighting each other over fundraising for her campaign. She had lots of money last time, so she was determined to have even more money this time. But that money has been wasted paying an army of useless people who couldn’t even do something as basic as produce a good logo.

Hillary Clinton was paranoid, controlling and dishonest last time. She decided to be twice as paranoid and dishonest this time around and it destroyed her image and her campaign.

Even before the rope lines and the interview boycotts, the media hated her. Once she began to aggressively shut out the media, its personalities gleefully reported on every email server scandal detail that her enemies in the White House fed to theNew York Times and other administration mouthpieces.

It wasn’t a vast right wing conspiracy or even a more real left wing conspiracy that destroyed Hillary Clinton. If she were a stronger candidate, Obama and the left would have fallen in line behind her.

Once again, Hillary Clinton destroyed her own candidacy. The latest Quinnipiac poll shows that the top three words people associate with her are “liar,” “dishonest” and “untrustworthy.” If she hadn’t planned a cover-up before there was even anything to cover up and then responded to its disclosure with a series of terrible press conferences climaxing in asking reporters if they meant that she had wiped her email server with a cloth, her old reputation might have stayed buried long enough to win an election. . .